Scientists study the world to gather knowledge. Engineers utilize this knowledge to solve problems and create a better world. This blog is about using biological knowledge to engineer better gardens, more efficient systems, tastier foods, and, well, anything else I can think of.

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

For the last several months, I have been throwing down a
whole lot of information. Thank you, loyal readers, for sticking with me. I am
going somewhere with this. There are a great number of techniques that can be
used to repair our degrading ecosystem, and do so while providing a comfortable
living for those doing the repairs. But people need to understand how this all
needs to work. We live in a society that is separated to a great extent from
nature. In order to fix what needs to be fixed, we need to first bring people
back to nature, to help them understand it and learn how to heal it.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. As I mention
regularly, this is an engineering blog. I do my best to use engineering problem
solving techniques. And the first and foremost among those is this: if you wish
to solve a problem, you first have to define the problem. So, what is the
problem we are facing? And I don’t mean global warming, degrading farm land, or
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Those are symptoms. What is the problem? Let
me offer my viewpoint on this.

The problem, as I see it, is an ultimate flaw with the
changes made during the Industrial Revolution. Bear with me here. See, prior to
the Industrial Revolution, some 90% of humanity lived a pastoral existence on
small family farms. When the Industrial Revolution hit, it needed two things to
function and grow: it needed workers, and it needed consumers. It is basic
supply and demand. So farmers were encouraged, and sometimes forced, to leave their
land and move to the cities. They were promised a better life and more
prosperity. For the most part, that prosperity was finally realized during the
50s with an expansion of the middle class.

But it proved to be short-lived. As an economy grows, it
builds wealth, actually creates it. For the last 15 years, those gains have largely gone to the elite and the middle class has seen no appreciable
increase in earnings. Prices have continued to rise, though, so the difference
between the two has caused a contraction of the middle class, with millions of people watching their standard of living decrease with little hope of reversing the slide.

There is also a more insidious problem. The Industrial
Revolution taught us that we could be separated from the land and that even our
food production could be automated. The consequences have been disastrous.
Ultimately, humans are biological beings and are intimately connected to the
environment we live in in ways we are just beginning to understand. Land needs
to be managed or the biological processes that keep it alive degrade.

So here we are. The profits that can be extracted have been.
The rich are richer than they have ever been in the history of the world. They
are trying harder and harder to find ways to increase profits. Wages have
stagnated to the point that large swathes of humanity are barely making it
paycheck-to-paycheck. Our environment is forfeit. We are looking at the looming
threat of technological unemployment as more companies try to further cut
expenses by automating as many tasks as possible. The outlook is bleak.

Or is it? Maybe this is exactly what we needed right now. See,
momentum is the biggest obstacle to change. As long as everything is going
along great, people won’t make changes. Comfort is hard to compete with. But
discomfort and uncertainty, well, that has people craving change. Heck, a
presidential candidate used it as his campaign slogan a couple of years back. The
trick is for people to get to a very difficult realization: that they are on
their own. As long as you rely on those in power for your livelihood, you are
subject their whims and have little control. But when you decide to take
control of your own life, that’s where the magic happens.

The question is, how? We live in an urban, and largely
suburban, landscape. We like our connected, technological lifestyle. Who wants
to give that up to move back to the country and pursue a homestead lifestyle?
Well, lots of people, actually, but I am talking to the rest of us here. How
can we live our modern lifestyle and still pursue some measure of
self-sufficiency. Personally, I think that small-scale regenerative agriculture
is the key here.

Small-scale regenerative agriculture is the perfect solution
for the predicament we have ourselves in. It solves the problems on pretty much
every level. There have been a number of significant advances since the last
time we were an agrarian society. And I don’t mean in the technology of the
tractors currently tearing up vast swaths of farmland. Things like organic
farming (if you think this one is ancient, you probably don’t understand it),
aquaponics, and mycoculture have all come a long, long way in the last 200
years or so. Technology can be employed in ways never dreamed of even 30 years
ago. With careful layout and design, more food than ever can be grown in a
smaller space all while regenerating the environment.

So what can small scale regenerative agriculture do to solve
the problems at hand today? Let’s tackle them one by one and see.

Climate Change/Environmental Degradation

This one is probably the easiest to justify. Regenerative
agriculture is, by definition, regenerative. This means reducing monoculture,
increasing environmental diversity, and building soil. The simple process of
building soil means adding carbon to the soil, a process also called Carbon
Farming. With enough practitioners of this practice, significant amounts of
carbon could be sequestered into the soils of the earth. Plus, the restoration
of life to soil helps mitigate pollution and further increases environmental
diversity, which will breathe life into ecosystems beyond the farming
operation.

Stagnating Wages

In a household budget, there are two sides to the flow of
money: income and expenses. Most people are struggling through increases in
expenses while their wages have virtually stagnated for decades. It can be very
frustrating to find more and more ways to cut expenses just to make ends meet.
Introducing solar dollars to the household budget can breathe new life into the
flow of money. With new methods and technologies, this can happen with only
minimal additional effort on the part of the homeowner, but can result in a
much tastier and healthier diet.

Technological Unemployment

As most are aware, machines are going to be taking all the
jobs. I have heard projections as high as 60% of jobs will be lost over the
next 20 years to automation. Personally, I think this move is highly
shortsighted. While there will be a huge savings in production costs, that
doesn’t really help if everyone is unemployed and can’t afford to buy gadgets
at the new low cost. Regardless of how bad this move will allow companies to
shoot themselves in the foot, it is coming. So, what can be done about it?

Simply put, people are going to have to become more
self-sufficient. They will need to stop relying on employers for their
livelihood. This used to be the way nearly everyone lived before the Industrial
Revolution and they did so by living primarily off of solar dollars.
Sustainable agriculture allows a return to this paradigm, allowing individuals
to reduce or eliminate reliance on employers.

Urban Malaise

I read a comment recently that I thought was spot-on: You
don’t hate Mondays. You hate capitalism. Maybe it is capitalism. Maybe it is
our lack of connection to the natural world. Maybe it is a lack of meaning in
our lives. Maybe it is knowing that we spend our days toiling away to build
value for someone else. Maybe it is pollution. Whatever the cause, a general
feeling of malaise, discontent, unhappiness, and restlessness are prevalent in
our society. Small-scale regenerative agriculture hits pretty much all of those
causes head-on. You are building value for yourself on your own land. You are
working with and regenerating nature. I don’t think it is that hard to
understand why gardeners are a happy lot.

Nutrition

As the nutrients are increasingly extracted from farmland,
our food loses its nutritional value. We become disconnected from the nutrient cycle. By regenerating our own land and building nutrient-rich soil, we
increase the nutrient content of the foods we eat. And by doing that
small-scale, we reconnect ourselves to our own nutrient cycle.

Health

Gardening is a great way to keep active. There is definitely
work involved. This can help with fitness and flexibility. Reconnecting our
bodies to the natural nutrient cycle will also help as our bodies will be
getting all the nutrient-rich foods they need.

The best part of all this is that we don’t need to drop our
modern lifestyle to realize all these benefits. Technology can play a big part
in reducing the labor on gardening while still improving output. Universal
availability of the internet means you can still ply your trade or profession
by working part time online throughout the week to bring in additional income.
We really can have the best of both worlds.

So, tell me, what did I miss? Are there other ways
small-scale urban agriculture can change the world?

Thursday, March 9, 2017

For the last several months, I have been hinting at this
grand project I have been working on. I have felt it more important thus far to
lay the foundation to talk about some of the concepts being implemented onsite.
But I think I am in pretty good shape right now in terms of concepts being out
there, and before I jump into my next series of posts, I wanted to take a
moment to talk about the project I am currently working on.

The site is called Phoenix ASH & Regrowth. It is a half
acre site in the Sunnyslope area a little north of downtown Phoenix. The
project is an attempt to achieve as high a level of self-sufficiency as
possible while simultaneously repairing the ecosystem onsite. The project site
will also serve as a demonstration site to help promote these ideas and make
significant improvements on a wide variety of fronts including food production,
nutrition, flood prevention, urban heat island effect, air pollution, economic
resiliency, erosion control, biodiversity, and much more. To achieve this,
nearly everything we do onsite is to achieve one of two goals: 1) Restore soil carbon, and 2)
Promote biodiversity. While this may sound a little overly simplistic, these
two things, when working in conjunction, cause a cascade of healthy biological
functions that achieve everything else.

Let me take a moment to describe how this cascade works.
Increasing the amount of carbon in the soil does two things primarily. The
first is that it increases absorption of rainwater. This increases biological
activity and helps mitigate flooding. The second is that it increases the
fertility of the soil. As I have explained previously, carbon in the soil feeds
the soil biome and increases the fertility of the soil and the availability of
nutrients in the soil. By increasing the available moisture in the soil and fertility
of the soil, plant growth is encouraged. Remember, as a gardener, my job is not
to take care of the plants. My job is to take care of the soil and the soil
takes care of the plants.

Once we have widespread growth of plants, we move to the
next level. As I have already mentioned, the driver of ecosystem processes is
the cycling of living matter from one organism to the next. This is where
diversity comes in. Different organisms make use of different food sources and
bring different benefits to the system. Rather than trying to dig through the
science of biological systems, most of which doesn’t really exist yet (don’t
even get me started on the faults with reductionist thinking employed by modern
science), it is best to let the ecosystem find its own healthy equilibrium. We
do that by including everything in the whole. There really are no weeds. The
only caveat is that they must provide more benefit than they detract. So a pine
tree was removed from the site because all it provided was shade. Oleanders
were removed because they are highly toxic. And there are a couple of weeds we
remove because of toxicity. Otherwise, everything is welcome.

Once the plants are growing, each one is valued for the
benefits it brings. Edibles are harvested for human consumption. Grass and
forbs are used for forage for the animals. Dead leaves and grass are harvested
for compost. Trees are pollarded to provide wood to build more soil. At each
level, the plant material runs through its cycle and is returned to the soil,
increasing soil carbon and helping plant growth and diversity.

So let me talk for a moment about the various methods we
employ onsite to achieve all of this:

Holistic Management, as taught by the Savory Institute, is
more of a guiding principle. Everything we do is viewed through the lens of
Holistic Management and its principles. It is through Holistic Management that
we can make the best decisions for how to weave the myriad methods together
into one cohesive structure. The site also serves as the Arizona Savory Hub
(ASH) and the first urban demonstration site for the Savory Institute. We are
very excited to demonstrate that Holistic Range Management, which is typically
managed on large tracts of land in rural areas, can be applied in an urban
setting.

Permaculture

Permaculture is another guiding principle. The permaculture
core principles are also core values and guide what we do and how we rebuild a
complete ecosystem onsite.

Animal Impact, as described in Holistic Management is an
important part of how nutrients are cycled through plants and back into soil.
Right now, we just have chickens and are using them to process forage and
create compost. However, long term plans include goats and sheep, and maybe
even miniature cows or rabbits. Each animal will have its own impact on the
ecosystem, improving diversity and nutrient cycling.

Organic gardening, in its ideal form, builds soil carbon,
reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. By not
using chemistry to manage a biological system, the biological system is allowed
to flourish, encouraging diversity and growing topsoil. Everything we do onsite
at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth is organic.

While some of the organic matter is either processed in
place (as in animal impact) or allowed to lie where it falls, much of the
organic matter produced onsite is processed through the composting facility
onsite. This turns decaying organic matter into high quality topsoil more
rapidly so it can be spread back out where it is needed most. In addition, we
use the chickens (Animal Impact) to process the compost. This allows the
chickens to feed off of whatever they deem edible in the compost, including
insects that are attracted to the rotting material. It also allows their
droppings to be immediately incorporated into the compost. This helps the
compost get hot and complete its cycle quickly. And when it is time for the
compost to be turned? The chickens help with that, too.

At just 9” of rain a year, Phoenix is a desert. But with
careful planning and a little infrastructure, the rain can be stretched really
far. To do, this, we use two primary strategies at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth.
The first is rainwater barrels. There are two rainwater barrels on each of the
three buildings onsite. The two smaller buildings have smaller, flattened
barrels that sit up against the building. These each hold a little over 500
gallons. On the largest building, there are two larger barrels, each holding
about 2600 gallons. The smaller tanks are perhaps a little undersized for the
areas they catch, and the larger tanks are a bit oversized. However, with a
little planning and some plumbing, we are able to drain the smaller tanks into
the larger as they fill up, assuring that no rain is lost. This water is used
to water the gardens.

The second type of rainwater harvesting comes from offsite
flow, or water that is flowing onto the property. The property has a wash
flowing through it. While this was a major problem for previous owners, it is
seen as an advantage at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth. With a little regrading,
the site was turned into a series of retention basins. As each retention basin
fills, it overtops into the basin below it. By doing this, all, or nearly all,
of the offsite flow can be captured and stored in the ground. This has the
added benefit of reducing downstream flooding. The best part is that the first
basins built are already growing lots of vegetation and thus building soil
carbon. The change in water infiltration is already visible, with no water
standing in these basins a mere 24 hours after a big rain. The newer basins,
which haven’t had much of a chance to grow vegetation yet, take 3 or 4 days to
drain, even though they get less water.

Nitrogen Producing Trees

In desert ecosystems, and in particular degraded desert
ecosystems, there is often a lack of nitrogen in the soil. This can be a
limiting factor for the growth of plants and thus the ecosystem as a whole.
Nitrogen producing trees, such as palo verde, acacia, and mesquite can make a
big difference in this area. Not only do they fix nitrogen from the air and
make it into a usable form, but many are well adapted to dry climates with poor
soil. They are drought tolerant and fast growing.

As the trees grow, they produce a great amount of biomass.
Every two years, the trees at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth are pollarded, and a
few select trees are coppiced. The branches and twigs that are cut off are used
for a variety of purposes. They are used as feedstock for growing mushrooms, some are used to produce biochar. The bulk are chipped to either produce mulch
for various areas around the site or as a bulk carbon source in the compost
bins. The biomass produced by pollarding and coppicing becomes a large portion
of the biomass we use to feed the soil.

In addition, trees typically have a root structure that
mimics the size and extent of the canopy above. When the tree is trimmed back,
the tree abandons roots and pulls back, adding as much carbon down in the soil
as is harvested from above.

Some of the branches that are either trimmed out or are the
result of random pruning throughout the year are used to create new garden
beds. This use of hugelkultur adds a long-lasting source of carbon to the soil
and provides a lasting source of food for the soil biome where it is needed
most.

Woody debris that is too big for the chipper, unusable for
mushroom feedstock, or otherwise scrap material is processed into biochar. The
biochar is added to the compost. Once there, it collects nutrients through the
processing process. Then it is added to the soil with the rest of the compost
where it is used to improve soil quality in perpetuity.

Growing mushrooms is difficult in the desert, but it can be
managed. Mushrooms are used in the intermediary process between wood chips and
soil creation and provide an additional product. We are also working to find
ways to use mushrooms to improve degraded areas of the site. This is a
technology that has a lot of potential and we are working on finding a way
around the challenges to best make it work.

Phoenix ASH & Rebirth is located in a very brittle
environment and the bulk of the site is being managed with this in mind.
However, many of our common vegetables require quite a bit more water, thus
necessitating a non-brittle microclimate. In this interest, we are looking for
technologies that help use the water resources available onsite to their
maximum utility. Aquaponics has some great potential in this respect, being
particularly efficient with both water and nutrients. However, as a soil-less
technology, it doesn’t fit as well with the goals of the site. We are exploring
other options to improve the technology to be more organic.

As you can see, we have a whole lot going on for just a half
acre. But combined, these techniques work closely together to make some
significant changes in a degraded environment. Please help me in spreading the
word. If we can turn a half acre in downtown Phoenix into a productive food
forest and organic farm, it can be done anywhere. We just have to have a way to
get these concepts out there and teach people to implement them. This world is
fixable, and it can be done using the techniques provided to us by nature.
Let’s get on this.

About Me

Disclaimer

I am not an expert on any of the topics presented here, merely an enthusiastic hobbyist. I claim no responsibility for how this information is used and make no guarantees that it is completely accurate, only accurate to the best of my knowledge.